Monday, June 15, 2009

A Bad Taste In My Mouth....

I'm posting this as a public service to anybody who might have in the past or might in the future experience these symptoms.

It all started (or so it seemed) last Tuesday morning. My office is mere steps away from a commercial kitchen that prepares food for more than one venue (kinda hard on the diet, I know...). So, having rushed out the door in order not to be late for work that morning, I popped my head in the kitchen and grabbed something quickly to substitute for that "most important meal of the day". Our cook is phenomenal but the food tasted positively foul and I wondered to myself as I grudgingly tossed it without comment, whether he was experimenting with some new and unusual spice. It was definitely not for me....

A few hours later, one of the kitchen aides pops his head into our office with a real treat. Chocolate pudding - freshly made. Would we like a taste? Sure, why not... my morning hunger was still not assuaged. Imagine my surprise when this creamy indulgence tasted METALLIC and BITTER. Did I sense a trend? Maybe it wasn't the food. Perhaps it was me......

All the rest of that day, everything that crossed my lips produced an intensely revolting taste on the very back part of my tongue.

This was driving me crazy and I got a lot of advice from well-meaning friends. Reflux. Dental Issues. Yet I knew that the taste was far too localized and intense to be either one of those issues. That's where Google came to the rescue. A quick search of "bitter taste in my mouth" yielded a wholehost of fascinatingstories of people with the exact same symptoms as I was experiencing, which developed 1-3 days after eating pine nuts from China. I had eaten some pine nuts on Sunday! A quick call to the company in question confirmed that their product was indeed imported from China. Who knew? Although I can finally enjoy food again, my tongue is still not 100% "right" today....

Suffice it to say, don't go looking for the pine nuts in Susie Fischbein's Purple Cabbage Salad when you eat dinner at my house next time. That horrible taste hangs around for days and it's enough to make you swear off those little seeds forever.

G6, can't thank you enough for posting this. A few weeks ago one of my daughters was complaining about a horrible taste in her mouth and that any food she was eating tasted awful, so her appetite fled. This had happened to her before, about 2 months ago, and the doctor then presumed a mouth yeast infection, which can also give you a bad taste in the mouth, and he prescribed medication for it. It took weeks the first time to go away. The second time the doctor again prescribed medicine for a yeast infection and again it took a few weeks to go away.

Well guess what. My daughter loves pine nuts and she eats them all the time. And yes, after she did some investigating, the nuts she ate before both supposed yeast infections came from Asian pines. I sent her your posting and she sent it to her doctor. Bless you for solving a mystery that was puzzling us all.

Twenty years ago a mashgiach advised me never to eat anything from China. ("Not that it's not kosher, but it's definitely not up to our sanitary standards." or something like that.) With the toxic toothpaste and this story and so many others, I would say it's been very good advice.